Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev’s first feature in nearly a decade, ‘Minotaur,’ premieres at Cannes
Director Andrey Zvyagintsev premiered his new film Minotaur at the 79th Cannes Film Festival — his first feature in nearly a decade.
The audience gave the film an eight-minute standing ovation, the Telegram news channel Ostorozhno Novosti reported. Zvyagintsev then addressed the crowd with a brief speech.
I will have only words of gratitude. I am grateful to our regular crew, which has been scattered like shrapnel across the world. […] I am deeply grateful to our producers in France, Germany, and Latvia, who made a Russian-language film possible. I am endlessly grateful to the cast, most of whom I was working with for the first time. […] And of course, to you, the audience of this great Lumière hall, which has welcomed us back within its walls. We’re just so happy to be back and doing what we do.
The film follows a company director bracing for large-scale layoffs who discovers his wife is having an affair. The lead roles were played by Iris Lebedeva, Dmitry Mazurov, Varvara Shmykova, and Yuri Zavalnyuk. Filming took place in Riga, Zvyagintsev said, though he noted audiences would be unlikely to recognize the Latvian capital on screen. “Only the owners of those locations and interiors will recognize them. Otherwise, audiences won’t. Because we shoot the whole thing like we’re right there in Russia. That’s just how we do it now,” the director said.
Zvyagintsev’s previous film, Loveless, was released in 2017. During the pandemic, he fell seriously ill with COVID-19 and underwent a long rehabilitation abroad; after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he did not return to Russia.
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